Planet snappers are foiled again

THE race to take the first picture of a planet outside our Solar System is on again. A year ago, NASA announced that the Hubble Space Telescope had glimpsed a planet being ejected from a star some 450 light years away (This Week, 6 June 1998, p 4). Some astronomers who had rejected an earlier claim by another group to have taken such a picture were convinced. But it now appears that the "planet" TMR-1C is merely a background star.

At two scientific conferences last month, Susan Terebey of the Extrasolar Research Corporation in Pasadena, California, who took the original picture, described further observations. Terebey is unwilling to discuss her unpublished findings with the media. But according to Keith Noll of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, they show that TMR-1C is much warmer than was thought. "It looks like a relatively hot object, maybe 2500 to 3000 ...

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